First, I would like to state that I appreciate transparency in any
company. It’s especially welcomed from Apple. Before their nebulous
rules for rejection or acception into the app store where a bit
nerve-racking. Second, I really like the informal verbiage behind the
guidelines. It almost sounds like Steve Jobs himself wrote it. Did they
make this because of the FCC investigation, perhaps fearing that
potential anti-trust proceedings would take place? Who knows. But it is
a welcome change for us developers.

If you didn’t already know, Reflect7 produces sports
apps targeted to sports fans. These
apps include features such as news, schedule, roster, stadium chart,
etc. Some would call these apps
shovelware. However, we take
great pride in the apps and what they offer our customers. We’ve gone to
great lengths to try to customize the look and feel of each app to its
respective team.

A few of the guidelines make me a bit nervous with the updated changes.
I’ll highlight a few of them:

2.20 Developers “spamming” the App Store with many version of
similar apps will be removed from the iOS Developer Program

10.4: I’m not sure what they mean by “alternate desktop” or “home screen
environments”… but our app looks a lot like the Facebook interface. Are
these considered a home screen environment?

2.20: This one worries me the most. Apple doesn’t know our intent. They
may see it as that we are trying to spam the store with many of the same
apps. We aren’t though. Really, that’s not our intent. If you ask any of
our customers who contact us, most would say that they received a
response almost instantly. We’ve given hundreds of dollars in gift
certificates to people who have had problems with their apps. We truly
care about our customer. Our customers were part of the motivation for
us to not drop the sports
apps. We care
about the apps. They have there fair share of problems, but one-by-one
they are being worked on.

But this doesn’t matter. If we should get rejected, we must pivot. We
must roll with the punches. We must change our business model a bit. I’m
confident we will persevere, despite this not being the first road block
from Apple. After all, it is our
fault.